Part 4

“Sure.--You big calf,” the old man said with gloom, “you always act so kind of surprised when one of ’em brags of you. You ain’t but twenty-nine and you’re a fine lookin’ jackass. Of course, she’ll show off her solytaire! A gal’s as vain as a man, any day. One of ’em’ll get you married, yet.--Yell at that cab, son. My legs are mighty tired.--See you at eight sharp. Now, mind, I won’t have nothin’ to say to Cora Boyle.”

Mark waited until the opening night of “The Merry Widow” for more news of Cora Boyle. She deserted her manager, Loeffler, while “Red Winter” was in the first week of its run at the 45th Street Theatre. Mark saw her lunching in the Knickerbocker grill with her young husband and a critic who always touted her as the successor of Ada Rehan. A busybody assured Mark that Cosmo Rand was twenty. Cora was thirty one. All three of her husbands, then, were younger. The oddity of theatrical marriage still alarmed Mark. In Fayettesville it was a fixed convention that girls should be younger than their husbands. But she was luscious to see at the “Merry Widow” opening. Mark thought how well she looked, hung above the crowd in the green lined box. She found novel fashions of massing her hair. That night it rose in a black peak sustained by silver combs. She kept a yellow cloak slung across one bare shoulder concealing her gown. Against the gentle green of her background appeared three men. Rand wore a single eye-glass that sparkled dully when the outer lights were low. Through the music and the applause Mark was conscious of the box and of Cora’s red feathered fan. Her second husband, a thin Jewish comedian, went up to shake hands in an entr’acte. Women behind Mark giggled wildly. He wandered into the bronze lobby where men were already whistling the slow melody of “Velia.” He was chaffed by an Irish actor manager born in Chicago whose accent was a triumph of maintained vowels.

“An’ why don’t you go shake hands with Cora, bhoy?”

“Shut up, Terry. Come have a drink?”

He steered his friend to a new bar. The Irishman was rather drunk but vastly genial. He maundered, “A fool Cora was to let go of you, bhoy. They’re tellin’ me you’ve made money in the stockmarket, too.”

“A little,” Mark admitted.

“I’ve had no luck that way. Well, a fool Cora was.--And how’s it feel bein’ a manager, lad?”

“Fine.”

The Irishman looked at Mark sidelong over his glass, then up at the gold stars of the ceiling.

“Ho!--Yes, it’s a fine feelin’.--Well, wait until you’ve put on a couple of frosts, bhoy! And have to go hat in your hand huntin’ a backer. You lend money, easy.--You’ll see all the barflies that’ve had their ten and their twenty off you time and again--You’ll see ’em run when they see you comin’. Well, here tonight and hell tomorrow.--So Cora’s quit Billy Loeffler, has she? The dhear man! May his children all be acrobats! ’Twas Gus Daly taught the scut every trick he knows. The Napoleon of Broadway! I mind Loeffler runnin’ err’nds for Daly in eighty five.--Well, you wanted to be a manager and here you are and here’s luck.--It’s a fine game--the finest there is--and, mind you, I’ve been a practicin’ bhurglar and a plumber. Drink up.”

They drank and returned to the green theatre, resonant with the prelude of the next act. Mark was struggling in the half lit thresh of men strolling toward their seats when Cosmo Rand halted him.

“You’d not mind coming to supper in our rooms at the Knickbocker?”

Mark accepted. The scene of the Maxim revel was lost to him while he wondered what Cora wanted. He wouldn’t engage her. Carlson’s prejudice was probably valid. The old man swore that she was worthless outside light comedy. Yet she had good notices in all her parts. She was famous for clothes. She signed recommendations for silks and unguents. She had made a dressmaker popular among actresses. She had played in a failure in London whence came legends of a passionate Duke. The Duke’s passion might be invented, like other legends. He mused. The flowing waltz music made him melancholy. What sort of woman was Cora, nowadays? Every one changed. He, himself, had changed. He was getting callous to ready amities, explosions of mean jealousy. He knew nothing of Cora, really. She might be a different person, better tempered, less frank. Women were incomprehensible, anyhow. He would never understand them, doubted that anyone did and sighed. He walked to Cora’s hotel with a feeling of great dignity. She had mauled him badly, abused him, lied to him and now she was seeking peace. Then, rising in the lift, he knew that this dignity had a hollow heart; he was afraid of Cora Boyle.

“This is awfully good of you,” she said, shaking hands. Then she rested one arm on the shelf filled with flowers and smiled slowly, theatrically, kicking her rosy train into the right swath about her feet. Mark felt the display as a boast of her body. She resumed, “There’s really no sense in our looking at each other over a fence, is there?”

His face, seen in a mirror among the flowers, cheered Mark to a grin. He looked impassive and bland. He drawled, “No sense at all,” and stepped back. But she confused him. He had to speak. He said, “That’s a stunning frock.”

“You always did notice clothes, didn’t you? Cosmo, do give Mr. Walling a drink.”

Her voice had rounded and came crisply with an English hint. But it was not music. It jangled badly against Rand’s level, “What’ll you have, sir?” from the table where there were bottles and plates of sandwiches. Mark considered this boy as they talked of “The Merry Widow.” He saw man’s beauty inexpertly enough. Young Rand was handsome in the fragile, groomed manner of an English illustration. His chin was pointed. His eyes seemed brown. His curls lay in even bands. He had neither length nor strength. But he talked sensibly, rather shrewdly.

“There’ll be a deal of money lost bringing over Viennese pieces, of course. This thing’s one in a thousand. Quite charming.”

Mark asked, “You’ve not been over here long?”

“I?” Rand laughed, “Lord, yes. I’m a Canadian. Born in Iowa, as a matter of fact. I’ve been a good deal in England, of course.--Oh, I was at your new piece the other night. Red Winter, I mean. How very nicely you’ve mounted it. I really felt beastly cold in that second act. The snow’s so good.”

Mark bowed, selecting a sandwich. The critics had praised the snow scene. Rand might truly admire it. If the snow hadn’t satisfied Mark it had pleased every one else. He lost himself in thoughts of snow. Cora trailed her rose gown to the table and poured water into a glass of pale wine. A broad bracelet on her wrist clicked against the glass. She said, “You and Carlson own all the rights to Red Winter, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to send it to London?”

He laughed and put down his glass. “London? What for? It’d last just about one week!”

Cora smiled over a shoulder, retiring to the shelf of flowers.

“It would do better than that, Mark. I’ve played in London.”

“I’ve never played there but I’ve been there enough to know better. California Gold Rush! They don’t know there was such a thing!”

“Oh, I say,” said Rand.

Cora sipped some watered wine. The light shot through the glass and made a pear of glow on her throat. She was motionless, drinking. She became a shape set separate from the world in a momentary gleam. He knew that she was acting. Then she said sharply, “I’ll buy the English rights if you and Carlson’ll make me a decent figure.”

“Oh, look here! You’d lose. I was talking to Ian Gail about it, last night. It wouldn’t make a cent in England. They wouldn’t know what it’s all about. And--it’s such a rotten play! There’s nothing in it!”

She asked, looking at him, “Can I have it?” and her flat voice took fire in the question, achieved music. She must want the poor play badly. Rand’s pink nails were lined along his moustache, hiding its silk. The room fell silent.

“Oh, sure,” Mark said, “You can have it, Cora. I’ll see Mr. Carlson in the morning.... But damned if I can make out what there is in the play.”

“It’s not the sort of thing you like, I know. But I’m sick of comedy and that’s all I’m ever offered, here. And I’m sick of New York. Well, make me an offer of the English rights--Only--I’m no bank, Mark.” She swaggered to the piano and tamely played a few bars of the Merry Widow waltz. She hadn’t Olive Ilden’s grace, so seated, and the rose gown seemed sallow against the black of the piano. She had finished her scene. Mark saw the familiar stir of her throat as she hid a yawn. He promised to hurry the business of the English rights to the melodrama and took his leave.

What had he feared? He tried to think, in the corridor. Recapture, perhaps, by this woman who wasn’t, after all, half as wicked as others. Her new elegance hadn’t moved him. The stage did refine people! Cora had the full air of celebrity. She was now controlled, vainer. She might still be a shrew. He saddened, ringing for the lift, and thought of Cosmo Rand’s future if “Red Winter” failed in London. The elevator deposited a page with a silver bucket and this went clinking to Cora’s door. Rand and she would drink champagne. Mark sank pondering to the lounge and stopped to buy a cigar, there. It was almost one o’clock. Many of the lights had been turned out. The threaded marble lost sheen in the smoky gloom. Parties ebbed from the supper room and a wedge of dressed men waved to Mark. A candy merchant in the lead bawled to him and Mark went to be introduced to an English actress on the millionaire’s arm. She swayed, gracious and tipsy, involved in a cloak of jet velvet, her voice murmurous as brushed harp strings emerging from the pallor of her face above the browning gardenias on the cloak. She asked, “Like this wrap? Makes me feel like a very big black cigar--I should have a very broad red and gold band.” The men pressed about her fame sniggered, respecting this lovely myth. She was assigned in legend to the desire of princes. The candy merchant grinned, cuddling her hand on his waistcoat. She tapped the brass edge of the turning door with a gardenia stem and smiled at Mark’s silk hat, then at the millionaire. “Am I talking too loud, cherished one?”

“Shout your head off,” the candy merchant said, “It’s a free country.”

“Oh, only the bond are free,” she proclaimed. She told Mark, “Bond Street’s getting frightfully shabby. Max Beerbohm says--I do look rather like a very big black cigar, don’t I?--Do stop pulling my arm, you dear, fat thing!”

“The car’s here, honey.”

“How dear of the car! We’re going to sup somewhere, aren’t we? Oh, no, to bed.--Like a very big, black cigar--”

She was drawn through the brazen doors away from Mark. The men pushed after her avidly. She went tottering to the great motor, was engulfed. Mark blinked in the waning smell of gardenias, waited for the motor to be gone and walked into the street. He saw rain falling. There was no taxicab in sight along the street. From the west an orange palpitation flooded this darker way. Steam from a clamorous drill blew north about the white tower of the Times building. Wet cabs jerked north and south along the gleam of rails. The higher lights were gone. The rain dropped from an upper purple and rapped the crown of his hat as Mark strolled to the corner. Some one began to talk to him before he reached Broadway. Mark glanced at this beggar carelessly and paused to dig in a pocket for change. The shivering voice continued.

“... ain’t like I’d come bothering you before. I ain’t that kind. But you’ve got comp’nies on the road and honest, Walling, I’m as good as ever I was. You’ve mebbe heard that I’m taking dope. Not so. Some of that bunch at Bill Loeffler’s office have been puttin’ that out. Honest--”

Three white capped young sailors blundered past, all laughing, and jarred the shadowy body away from Mark. The man came shuffling back and clung to Mark’s sleeve, his face lavender in the rainy light above a shapeless overcoat. He whispered on, “Honest, some of the things that bunch at Loeffler’s place say about you and Carlson! But I ain’t takin’ nothing, Walling. Had a run of bad luck. I’m on the rocks. But you’ve seen me run a show. You know I can handle a comp’ny--”

“The light’s so bad,” said Mark, “and your collar--I’m not just sure who--”

The man gave a whimpering laugh. “Oh, I thought you was actin’ kind of chilly to an old pal. I’m Jim Rothenstein. You know? I was stage manager for Carlson back when you was playin’ the kid in Nicoline. You know. I gave you your job. Cora Boyle she brought you in to me and asked if there wasn’t a little part--Honest, I ain’t takin’ dope. That bunch--”

Mark gulped, “Of course you’re not.” Some harsh drug escaped from the man’s rags. This was nightmare. Mark found a bill and held it out, backing from the shadow. “Come round to my office some day and I’ll see what--”

A hansom rolled to the curb and the driver raised his whip. Mark ran to shelter, crying his address. The grey horse moved toward Broadway. Mark shoved up the trap and shouted to the driver, “No! Go up Fifth Avenue!”

IV

Penalties

Cora Boyle played “Red Winter” in London for two years. She began her run in May of 1908 with a popular English male star as her hero. He presently retired from the company and Cosmo Rand replaced him. Olive Ilden wrote an opinion to Mark from her new house in Chelsea: “It seems to me that your one time wife is a competent second rate actress. She--or someone near her--must have intelligence. She has perfectly applied our musical comedy manner to melodrama. She is languid and rude to the audience and is enormously, successful, naturally. Ambrose Russell is painting her. If you knew London you would understand that to have Ambrose Russell paint one implies entire success. He alternates Gaiety girls and Duchesses and has acquired a trick of wonderful vulgarity. I met Miss Boyle at his studio on Sunday. We talked about you and she rather gushed. Her infantile husband stood by and said Rawther at intervals like an automatic figure on a clock. A pretty thing.... Of course I prefer London to Winchester. Ecclesiastical society is only amusing in Trollope. My husband got our house from a retired Admiral and it has a garden. I have fallen in love with him--my husband, not the Admiral. He has written a book of Naval tales on the sly and to my horror they are quite good. Having scorned him as a mere gentleman all these years it upsets me to have to consider him as an artist. I hear from Ian Gail that your plays all make quantities of money because they are utter rubbish in lovely settings and that your house is an upholsterer’s paradise. Very bad for the children who are probably spoiled beyond hope or help.”

Mark wrote four pages of denial and received: “Nonsense! Of course you do not have courtesans to lunch but leading ladies come and swoon on your drawing room floor and the children are pointed out in your Central Park as Mark Walling’s brats. Your parasites fawn on them. Their world is made up of expensive motors, sweets and an adoring idiot as God. The little boy reads theatrical reviews over his porridge and the little girl probably does not know that she is a mammal and liable to death, spanking or lessons. They live in a treacle well.... Your one time wife has taken a house near me and her pictures, eating breakfast in bed with a Pom on the pillow, adorn the Sketch. I danced with her husband last night.”

Cora Boyle’s photographs in the London Weeklies made old Carlson sneer. He lounged in Mark’s library and derided: “A fine figger and a pair of black eyes. Actress? Sure. She makes pictures of herself. And what the hell else do folks want, huh? Just that. They want pictures. You say they want fine scenery and new ideas about lights and all? Bosh, son! They want to see a good lookin’ gal in good clothes--and not much clothes--with all the lights in the house jammed on her. Act? Make ’em cry a little and they think it’s actin’. Margot’ll be the boss actress of the United States when she’s twenty--Come here, Maggie, and tell me how old you are.”

“Seven and a half,” said Margot, “and I don’t want to be an actress.”

“Huh. Why not?”

“Aunt Sadie says actresses aren’t nice,” Margot informed him.

Carlson wrinkled his yellow face and chuckled out, “Ask Mark what he thinks of ’em, sister.”

She turned her eyes up to Mark gravely and smiled. She was unlike her father, most like her mother. Mark bent and lifted her in the air, kissed her bare knees and put her hair aside from the little ears, faintly red, delightfully chilled for his mouth from a walk in the Park. She said, on his shoulder, “Oo, that’s a new stickpin, papa!”

“Diamonds get ’em all,” Carlson nodded.

“It’s a sapphire,” said Mark.

“Nice,” Margot approved and Mark felt glorified. Children were certainly a relief after the arid nonchalance of women who took money, jewels or good rôles and asked for more donations over the house telephone. Margot played with the sapphire square a moment and then scrambled down from Mark’s shoulder to his knee where she sat admiring him while he wrote checks. He smiled at her now and then, let her blot signatures and kissed her hands when she did so.

“You’d spoil a trick elephant,” Carlson muttered, “Ain’t Gurdy old enough to go to school?”

“He started in at Doctor Cary’s last week. They’ve got him learning Latin and French, right off.”

“What’s Doctor Cary’s?”

“It’s a school in Sixtieth Street.”

“Hump,” said Carlson, “Private School? Well, you’re right. Public schools teach hogwash. They got to. They teach hogs. But why didn’t you send him to one these schools out of town while you were at it? Get him out of New York.”

“My G--glory,” Mark cried, “He’s only nine!”

Margot corrected, “Ten, papa. He was ten in May.” Then she told Carlson, “Papa’d just die if Gurdy went away to school. He told Miss Converse.” She slid from his knee and curtsied to Carlson with, “I must take my French lesson, now. So, good afternoon.” She was gone out of the room before Mark could kiss her again. She was always within reach of kisses and her warmth, curled on his lap was something consolatory when he did send Gurdy away to Saint Andrew’s School in September 1910. Villay, his broker, and his lawyer advised the step. Olive Ilden wrote to him: “I am glad you have done the right thing. God knows I am no cryer up of the Public School System. But a Public School (I forget what you call private kennels for rich cubs in the States) is the only thing for the boy, in your situation. Ian Gail tells me that Gurdy is rather clever. I can imagine nothing worse than to be the son by adoption of a theatrical manager and a day scholar at a small New York school. But I know how miserable you are. Every one has sentimental accretions. I dislike seeing old women run down by motors, myself. No, I know how badly you feel, just now. But these be the fair rewards of them that love, you know? My own son is, of course, as the archangels. I hear through his Housemaster at Harrow that he smokes cigarettes and bets on all the races.”

Mark tried to take Gurdy’s absence with a fine philosophy. His broker and his lawyer assured him that Saint Andrew’s was the best school in the country. But the red, Georgian buildings spread on the New England meadow and the impersonal stateliness of the lean Headmaster seemed a cold nest for Gurdy. He missed the boy with a dry and aching pain that wasn’t curable by work on five new plays, Margot’s plump warmth on his knee or contrived, brief intoxication. All his usual enchantments failed. He wore out the phonograph plates of the Danse Macabre and the Peer Gynt “Sunrise.” He worried wretchedly and the disasters of October and November hardly balanced his interior trouble. Two, the more expensive two of the five Carlson and Walling productions failed. Carlson cheerfully indicated the shrinkage of applicants for jobs, hopeful playwrights and performers in the office above the 45th Street Theatre. Mark regretted twenty thousand dollars spent for shares in the Terriss Pictograph Company. Yet young Terriss was a keen fellow and Carlson thought something might come of motion pictures after a while. His friends sighed about Mark that the “show business was a gamble” and on visits to the farm Mark tried to be gay. A Military Academy had been built in Fayettesville on a stony field owned by Eddie Bernamer, the only heritage from Bernamer’s Norwegian father. Gurdy’s brothers were transferred to this polished school and Mark was soothed, in thinking that he’d made his own people grandees. He wished that he could ape the composure of the Bernamers and said so on a visit near Christmas time.

“But, great Cæsar,” Bernamer blinked, kicking balled snow from a boot-heel, “this Saint Andrew’s is a good school ain’t it, even if it is up by Boston? The buildin’s are fire proof, ain’t they? Gurdy can’t git out at night and raise Ned? Then what’s got into you?”

“Oh, but--my God, Eddie!... I miss him.”

“You’re a fool,” said his brother-in-law, staring at Mark, “You’re doin’ the right thing by the boy. You always do the right thing--like you done it by us. Sadie and me’ve got seven kids and I love ’em all.... They got to grow up. Stop bein’ a fool.... You don’t look well. Thin’s a rail. Business bad?”

“We lost about forty-five thousand in two months.”

“That countin’ in the thousand you gave Sadie for her birthday?”

“No--Lord, no!”

Bernamer looked about the increased, wide farm and the tin roofed garage where Mark’s blue motor stood pompous beside the cheap family machine. He drawled, “Well, you’ve sunk about twenty-five thousand right here, bud. You let up on us. Save your money and set up that theatre of your own you want so. And I’m makin’ some money on the side.”

“How?”

The farmer grinned.

“That no good Healy boy--Margot’s mamma’s cousin, come soft soapin’ round for a loan last summer. He and another feller have a kind of music hall place in Trenton. A couple of girls that sing and one of those movin’ picsher machines. They wanted five hundred to put in more chairs. I fixed it I’d get a tenth the profit and they’ve been sendin’ me twenty-five and thirty dollars a week ever since--and prob’ly cheatin’ the eye teeth out of me. Dunno what folks go to the place for--but they do.”

“Funny,” said Mark.

A bugle blew in the grey bulk of the Military Academy. Boys came threading out across the flat snow between ice girt tree trunks. A triple rank formed below the quivering height of the flagpole where the wind afflicted the banner. The minute shimmer of brass on the blue uniforms thrilled Mark. The flag rippled down in folds of a momentary beauty. He sighed and turned back to the pink papered living room where Gurdy’s small, fat legged sisters were clotted around Margot’s rosy velvet on a leather lounge. Old Walling smoked a sickening cheroot and smiled at all this prettiness. Margot’s black hair was curled expansively by the damp air. She sat regally, telling her country cousins of Mastin’s shop where Mark bought her clothes. She kissed every one good-bye when Mark’s driver steered the car to the door and told Eddie Bernamer how well his furred moleskin jacket suited him. In the limousine she stretched her bright pumps on the footwarmer beside Mark’s feet and said, “Oh, you’ve some colour, now, papa!”

“Have I? Cold air. D’you know you say na-ow and ca-ow, daughter, just like you lived on the farm the year ’round?”

Margot gave her queer, chiming chuckle which was like muffled Chinese bells. “Do I?”

“Pure New Jersey, honey. I used to. Mrs. Le Moyne used to guy me about it when I was a kid.”

“Miss Converse says ‘guy’ is slang,” Margot murmured.

“So it is, sister. We ought to go to England some summer pretty soon and let Miss Converse visit her folks.”

“I’d love to.... I’ve never been abroad,” she said, gravely stating it as though Mark mightn’t know, “And every one goes abroad, don’t they?”

“And what would you do abroad?”